Bizspace Spotlight

I often take for granted that everyone is utilizing Cloud Computing. While it may be a generic term, it has had practical impacts on my company’s strategy and day-to-day business. However, I’m not sure that many people fully grasp some of the reasons why it can make a significant difference in a company.

More than six years ago, Amazon launched its cloud computing platform, AWS. My first impression was it was a nice utility model for pharmaceutical companies doing protein folding, but I didn’t really see the full potential at that time. Beyond the technical impact, I now can’t imagine starting or running a software business without it.

My company, Innography, started using cloud computing back in 2008. At first, we made the switch mostly from a production standpoint to ensure uptime scalability of our software service. I remember thinking that clicking a button to launch a new machine within minutes was pretty cool, but I would then manually configure each new server.

Flash-forward to today, and we have hundreds of machines that automatically start, stop, backup, or crunch hundreds of terabytes of data. I know that may sound incredibly geeky, but I cannot overemphasize how much cloud computing has impacted my business.

So what are the practical applications? While not a panacea, there are three areas related to cloud computing that technology companies should consider:

First, build scalability and recovery directly into your product.

Amazon started its cloud computing services because of the excess capacity it had implemented to protect against peaks in traffic during the holidays. Reliability is extremely important — so how can you last as a company if your service is constantly down? The only way to guarantee uptime is having massively redundant systems spread around the world. This is prohibitively expensive without cloud computing.

However, you need to understand how to leverage cloud services to automatically failover, which is when the system switches to a redundant system. My favorite example is Netflix, which built a program called Chaos Monkey that purposely kills machines to ensure they are truly automatically failing over.

Second, give engineers their own sandbox clouds.

Most companies think of cloud computing only for their production servers and not for employees. However, I find that it is extremely valuable for engineers to have their own “clouds.”

For any big data company, engineers will typically spend a large portion of time simply waiting for computing processes to finish. This is extremely expensive, for instance, when looking for mistakes and you have to reprocess something several times. At Innography, we have given engineers the ability to launch their own mini-clouds to test deployments or perform massive data crunching. While there are still bottlenecks — see my comments on MapReduce for suggestions — it has empowered our engineers to solve larger and more complex problems.

We were initially concerned about the costs of letting developers spin up clouds, but we’ve learned the costs are very manageable with proper education: Remember to kill your cloud when you’re not using it. This is still an evolution, but I’ve been very impressed with our engineers’ ability to creatively leverage this infrastructure to solve big problems.

Third, consider cloud computing for competitive advantage.

Google, Rackspace, Amazon, and others are heavily competing on price to make it less expensive and gain market share. These providers are also significantly reducing the human costs of building out systems. So how can you leverage this to your competitive business advantage?

• Look for ways to cut costs and make your product cheaper, faster, and more scalable. Pass the cost savings onto the customers, or significantly increase performance at no cost and delight your customers.

• Develop capabilities your competitors can’t. Hadoop (ElasticMapReduce in Amazon) is one of my favorite technologies. While processing a few hundred gigabytes of data would take three or four weeks in 2007, I can now process 100 times that amount in 24 hours — all for less than $100. This capability takes a while to develop, but it is a huge advantage over others in flexibility and speed of new capabilities.

TYRON STADING is president of Innography, an Austin-based company that provides Web-based applications for managing intellectual property.